by Emma Newman
“Yes, Dr. Kubrin. I have made all of the data I ring-fenced available to you. Perhaps you didn’t notice the notification I sent.”
“I’ve been . . . No, I didn’t.”
Principia drops a shortcut into my visual field and I open the folder containing dozens of messages I have no memory of. From Mum, from Charlie . . . many are tagged “Mia.” There’s more than three weeks of communications, appearing like a gift.
I close the folder. I’m not ready to watch them yet. Instead, I dismiss Principia, go to the sketch pad and flip the cover back to look at the sketch. It’s exactly the same as the painting I found in Segundus, with one difference. The shadows. And now, knowing what I do, I don’t see shadows of people standing on the rim of the crater, just out of shot. I see the shadows left by the burning glare of a nuclear blast, staining the red dust of Mars with an echo of the dead.
* * *
• • •
WE gather in the communal area, silently exchanging embraces and questions about how we are coping. Everyone looks tired and drawn, but the raw horror has passed. It’s finally sinking in. Petranek prints us tortilla chips and salsa, commenting that the printer outside the gym is best for sour cream in case anyone wants to print some. No one does.
“How’s Arnolfi?” Banks asks Elvan.
“The concussion has passed and her arm is pretty much healed. Her chip is providing neurochemical assistance but she’s very withdrawn. I’m not sure we can keep her confined to quarters indefinitely.”
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Banks says. “All of it, actually. Anna was right to call this meeting. We don’t have the luxury of taking any more time out to grieve. We have hard decisions to make. I don’t think Arnolfi has the right to be here for this discussion, given what she did. Does anyone disagree?”
Elvan frowns. “We can’t just ignore her.”
“We can’t trust her either,” Petranek says.
“I suggest we revoke all of her medical privileges permanently, along with her right to digital privacy,” Elvan says. “We give Principia strict instructions on how it interacts with Arnolfi and we try to bring her back into the group.”
“But she crossed a line,” Petranek says.
“So we punish her forever?” Elvan glares at Petranek; then his features soften. “I know how you feel. But I don’t want to be the sort of person who makes another suffer for the rest of her life, just for making one poor decision.”
“Many poor decisions!” Petranek counters. “It isn’t just the wipe, Elvan; it’s the fact she lived with us, deceiving us, making us think our loved ones were alive when they were all dead! Taking hardware from the base to give to Segundus, hiding critical information from us. What if she had told us about that place? What if we could have all worked together to find a better solution than them all fucking off and damning us? She denied us that opportunity, to save her own neck. I can’t forgive her for that. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
“Then what do you suggest?” Banks says. “A trial? A formal punishment?”
Petranek’s lip curls in disgust. “No! I don’t know. We could send her to Segundus.”
“Solitary confinement, then,” Elvan says, shaking his head. “That’s cruel.”
“Then go with her!” Petranek snaps and then immediately holds up hir hands. “Shit, I’m sorry, Elvan. I’m sorry. I just . . . I can’t deal with this sort of crap. I’m a bloody engineer. I’m not cut out for making decisions like this.”
“I think we need to put the issue of Arnolfi to one side,” I suggest. “Like Banks said, we have hard decisions to make. Whether we stay on Mars, for one. We have the ship and the fuel to go back to Earth. One-way trip, I reckon, given what’s happened. Does anyone want to do that?”
Everyone looks at one another, as if waiting for someone else to speak first. “I think it would be suicide,” Banks finally says. “All I can pick up is the emergency broadcast signal. There’s no Internet. No power in a lot of places as far as I can tell. I reckon a lot of places were hit by EMP blasts. It’s going to be hell there. Chaos.”
Petranek and Elvan both nod. “I agree, for what it’s worth,” I say. “I don’t think we could survive there, and there wouldn’t be any guarantee we’d even be able to land safely. So that means we’re staying here, then.”
It’s something we’ve all been facing since that hammerblow at Segundus, but actually voicing it for the first time makes it feel more real. We sink into silence and I feel that surging, brutal grief drawing close again, threatening to drown me once more. I grip the edge of the table, pushing it back, unwilling to fall apart in front of them all.
“I’ve been running some numbers actually,” Petranek says after a loud clearing of hir throat. “This is the stuff I am cut out for, after all. We can survive for the next two years without lifting a finger, pretty much. That’s based on current usage of power, oxygen, water and food printers. We’ve built up a decent food-printer canister store by restocking above usage levels with each delivery from Earth, but that will run out. In terms of power, there’s no problem. It’s all renewable energy and we have printers and a really good clean room in Segundus to make replacement parts if we need to. Same goes for oxygen production and structural integrity. As for water, I can guarantee supply for ten years, if our usage doesn’t change and if the ice sources are as extensive as the data suggested.”
“I’m fairly confident they are,” I say, so relieved to have something unemotional to focus on. “I reviewed all the data on the trip over. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find other places to drill bores, but I have time to find good locations.”
“Lucky we’ve got a geologist,” Banks says kindly.
“Yeah,” I say, accepting the implicit apology. “Looks like I will be useful after all.”
“So food is the issue, then,” Elvan says. “What can we do about that?”
“The garden dome was mothballed after the damage caused by the big storm three years ago,” Banks says. “It was pretty crap anyway, but it could be repaired and improved maybe?”
Petranek nods. “It’s worth a try. But I think we’ll be better off farming some algae and building a processor to refill the printer canisters. It’ll be a lot of work, but I could do it with help and there are loads of drones and equipment at Segundus. There are algae cultures ready to start it off, because they planned to do this years ago and shelved it. And we will probably find more food-printer canisters over there too, come to think of it. So we have time.”
“I need to discuss molecular-printer requirements with you,” Elvan says to Petranek. “We’re going to need more vitamin D supplements, and a few other things are going to run out in a year or so.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I say, making them all face me. “I mean, look at you. You’re the most intelligent, skilled and awesome people I’ve ever met. We have the hardware. We have an AI with tons of Mars-specific experience. We can do this.”
“Careful, Kubrin,” says Petranek with a glint in hir eye. “You’ll be suggesting a group hug soon.”
“There is one more thing I want us to discuss,” Banks says. “I think we need to develop our own contract for living here together. As far as I can tell, GaborCorp no longer exists. There’s been no contact for over five weeks now. It’s way past the official limit when another organization would intervene. So I say we declare ourselves an independent colony with new rights, responsibilities . . . the whole shebang.”
“I have many thoughts and feelings about this,” Petranek says with a broad grin. “I’m printing more chips. Anyone want coffee?”
My APA pings me before I can reply. The notification makes me jolt. “I have a new message,” I say, making everyone else freeze. “At least I think I do. Incoming data of some sort.”
“From Earth?” Elvan says.
“I don’t know. It’s still down
loading. It looks weird. Principia, it looks like my APA is downloading a huge packet of information. Do you know what this is? Is there an actual message?”
“I am not detecting any incoming data, Dr. Kubrin,” Principia replies.
“There’s nothing coming in on the comms,” Banks says. “Is your chip—”
“Hello, Dr. Kubrin.”
The room around me fades and I’m back in my apartment, the table filling the room, all the old paintings on the walls. Travis is sitting at the table, just like all the other times I talked to him, but he’s wearing different clothes. His hair is shorter, worn in a less fashionable style, and he looks tired.
“I’m sorry if you were pulled here. I could only do so much with what I had available and this is a message I don’t want you to miss.”
I sit down, hoping that the others are taking care of my body as my mind is focused here. “What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t had the time to predict dialog trees for this message, so I’ll keep it to the point. I’m not on Earth. I’m on Atlas 2, a ship created by the Circle cult to follow the Pathfinder. We left Earth thirty-nine days ago and we’re moving pretty fast now, so I had to bundle all this up damn quick and send it in a rough-and-ready package before the distances got too great. I’m not an expert on sending data across distances like this without a relay.
“I’m sorry I didn’t send this before. I’ll be honest; I forgot about our arrangement. Things moved quickly on Earth and then after we left . . .” He pauses, looks away for a moment. “You’ll already know what happened after we left. The American gov-corp funded this venture and didn’t want anyone to follow us. There are about ten thousand people on this ship, and only I and two others know what they did—other than the bastards who gave the order, of course.
“For what it’s worth, the Circle had no idea that was going to happen. They’re good people.
“There are two things you need to know. One is that your sister is still alive. She’s on this ship. I’ve known her for months in the Circle and just didn’t make the connection. Different names . . . you’re not very alike, but anyway, she’s alive and well.
“The second is that I’ve had the data on the Pathfinder’s destination, and the tech she used to build Atlas, for many years. I helped the Circle with it, and now I want to help you with it. I know my husband was developing the same tech at various research facilities, but not what he was planning to do with it. As far as I could tell, you weren’t involved. That’s why I’m sending it to you now. It’s everything that was in the capsule. Everything you and the rest of the Mars Principia crew need to build a craft to follow us. There’s nothing left for you on Earth now, and I can’t see why you’d want to stay on Mars, so if you want to try, build something and follow us. Hey, maybe we’ll get to have a drink together after all.
“Good luck, Dr. Kubrin. I hope to see you again one day.”
The room disappears and then in the next blink I see Elvan’s face. I’m lying on the floor in the communal room and he’s kneeling next to me. Petranek and Banks are hanging back, looking worried. I blink again and Elvan smiles.
“You back?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.” I sit up. My APA notifies me of the need to create a temporary space in Principia’s memory to cope with the huge amount of data that is still pouring in, getting too big for my own personal cache to handle. I approve it and get to my feet.
“I think there’s another option on the table,” I say to the others. “You might want to sit down.”
EPILOGUE
TWO YEARS LATER
“ARE YOU NEARLY finished?” Elvan’s voice comes through the helmet speakers, making me smile.
I look down at my old wedding ring in the palm of my glove. He doesn’t know I have it. “Yes.”
“Because we’re going to start preflight checks in an hour.”
“It’s okay. I’m not far away. I have plenty of time. And Petranek won’t let me touch anything anyway.”
“Okay. Just . . . just leave plenty of time to get back, darling.”
He’s nervous. “I will. See you soon.”
For the past two years, the ring has been kept in its box, the fake chucked into the recycler on the same day I found the real one. It wasn’t hard to find—Principia knew where I’d been in my first month here and for how long; it was just a matter of retracing my steps with a metal detector that it helped me to make.
I tilt the ring to read the engraving inside. Stronger together. It never rang true when I first read it, and now it’s just a sad reminder of how ill-suited Charlie and I were for each other. The fact that he sprang the engraving on me, without discussing what it would say, still grates, even all these years after his death. I need to let this go.
But I’m not ready yet, and there’s something else to finish first. I tuck the ring into my belt pouch and carry on scraping a channel in the dust, finishing a long loop that forms the tip of a tail.
It’s taken me all these years to work out what to draw in the dust for my mother. Instead of making something poignant, or overly complex, I’ve decided upon something that would make her smile: a simple line drawing of her cats, Odin and Frigg, curled up next to each other. It may not be sophisticated, but I know she would love it. And just like she said I would, I find myself smiling at the thought of her on the sofa, the cats clambering over her as she complains lovingly. I send up the cam drone, check that it looks right and then take a picture. There’s no way to know how long it will last, but that’s not what’s important. It’s what she wanted.
“Mind if I join you?” Arnolfi’s voice comes through just as I’m guiding the drone back to the rover.
“Not at all.”
I turn to see her approach and give her a wave.
“I’m not the only one who needed to come outside, then,” she says when she arrives.
“It’s a big day,” I say. “Nervous?”
She nods. “You?”
“Terrified. And Elvan is like a mother hen.” I rest a hand on her shoulder and she mirrors the movement. “Petranek and Principia think it’s ready and that’s good enough for me.”
We turn and look down the hill toward Segundus, admiring the craft on the launchpad. At its core is most of the original rocket that brought me here, but now it is so much more than that. As Petranek said, “It ain’t pretty, but it’ll get the job done.”
“I’ve come to tell you something,” Arnolfi says. “I think . . . I think you’ll understand, better than the others will.”
“Look, we’ve been through all that. It’s behind us now. I know Petranek is still a bit prickly, but considering ze wanted to kill you, I think things have come a long way.”
Arnolfi drops her hand from my shoulder and turns to look away from the ship, out into the wilderness. “I’m not going with you.”
“What?”
“I’m going to stay on Mars. I’ve made my decision and it’s the right one for all of us.”
“Is this some sort of guilt-complex bullshit?”
“Anna.” She turns to me again. “Without me on the ship, the odds of mission success go up by fifteen percent.”
“Who worked that out? How?”
“It’s all to do with redundancies and how much more food there will be. Look, I don’t want to go into the details. Principia knows. It did the calculations. This is the right thing to do.”
“Is this your idea of penance?”
She sighs. “When I did what I did, I hated myself. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I need to stay here. I need to know I can put you all before me, like I should have done back then. And besides, I can live here for a long time. With more space.”
“But you’ll be alone.”
“I’ll have the prince. And I’ll be able to play all the opera that Banks hates as loud as I like.”
> I embrace her. The woman who wronged us all, who taught me how to forgive, who helped us to build the craft we’ll soon be leaving on. “You want me to tell the others, don’t you?”
She nods. “Will you? I said my good-byes to them all earlier. They just didn’t realize it.”
“Yeah, if that’s what you want.”
“It is. Take care, Anna. Godspeed.”
I try to speak, but my throat is clogged. I head back to the rover and, after another wave, watch Arnolfi head out, away from Segundus. She wants to watch the launch from a safe distance. I almost run after her, to try to convince her to come, but I have to respect her choice. And I understand it. I would have done anything to prove I was a better mother, had I had the chance. This need to prove that we are not the worst of ourselves can sometimes make us better people. She has the right to find her own proof.
I sniff, not wanting to cry when I can’t wipe my nose, and take out the wedding ring again. I can’t take this with me either.
I dig a hole, stare at the ring for a long moment and then drop it in. This is the second time I’ve done this, but this time it isn’t to bury my guilt, as I’m sure it was before. It’s to put something to rest.
I cover it, rest my hand over the little mound for a moment and then stand up. Mars, in all its barren, rust-colored glory, will soon be a memory, merely the place I was when everything ended, and everything began. And for the first time, I have no doubts about where I am going or even about the hope that fills me. I will be with people I love, and that is all that matters.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OH, THIS WAS such a hard book to write! What really didn’t help was that our house was filled with builders for a large chunk of the first draft, so I want to thank my mum for giving me a quiet spot to write in when I had to run away from all the noise and dust.
